


sleep-walking

by regulidae



Series: i love you like [3]
Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, just 2 be safe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 11:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19333516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regulidae/pseuds/regulidae





	sleep-walking

i try to fill it up with you

 

 

Rei’s hands are restless.

He picks up a worn-out book – pink cover, dog-eared pages – flips through it once, twice, puts it back, picks it up again. Inhales the smell of the old pages, sneezes powerfully, drums out a rhythm on the cover, with the tips of his fingernails, gently. It slides out of his senseless hands and thumps on the floor, and he stares. He sucks a breath through dry lips and finds himself, vaguely, with a faraway part of his mind, rocking. Slightly, just a bit. Back and forth, for real or maybe that’s just how he feels, heartbeat filling his head.

His body is sticky from sweat, palms being the worst, and he really needs to pee, but he can’t bring himself to stand up; the wrinkles of uniform trousers are probably leaving deep marks in his skin.

His phone has finished charging and the socket is chirping quietly, the only noise next to the bored hum of the laptop. This is one of the things his brain registers, next to the pencil abandoned on the floor and a box on the coffin, holding exactly one cold and hard slice of pizza. He can’t connect them together, make anything out of it, they exist as separate entities; it’s like he woke up in a completely strange place. He pets the cover with one finger. Taps the space bar nervously, lightly, without actually pressing it. The screen dims, and in a moment, it’ll turn to black and he won’t have to see the empty slate of the sound mixing program, and if – if he makes one motion with his hand, just one, he’ll be free from the pure white pages of the notebook in front of him.

He does so.

The notebook slaps against the floor and Rei presses his cheek against the lid of the coffin. It’s cool. Something in him is turning, not fluttering but writhing, curdling or shuddering, like Shu Itsuki when he touches a wet sponge, and his pulse, his pulse, his pulse is. It might be. It certainly exists.

God, but is it really the tea?

Rei makes a mental list of things he’s eaten today. His hands are sweaty and hot. He’s had one… no, two, two cups of green tea. Is that it? Maybe it’s the effect of drinking tea on empty stomach. But no, there was something else. Something like a… bread, it had flour in it, a breadly being, a sandwich, yes, a sandwich. Koga bought him a sandwich.

Koga, Koga, Koga, Koga.

He and his sweet lips pressed in a grimace, when all Rei did was just

“I’ll stay at school today, I need to focus on that song and it’ll take long, I’d only bother you.”

more or less, but that was it. He said that because. Because he really thought that, because he doesn’t want to bother Koga, he’s already enough of a nuisance, but Koga wasn’t satisfied. Why?

Hands sweaty. Screen dark. If Rei stood up – a few steps to the wall – and turned the light off, he would be wrapped in a warm lack of light. He could rest his head on the coffin again, close his eyes and see what happens. He would look busy in the morning.

But Koga.

Koga is asleep now, Rei thinks, for sure. Sleeping on his left side, plump lips parted. Leon curled against his chest. He, Koga, is warm and smells divinely, and Rei’s hands are sweaty. He understands Koga a bit. He would grimace too, if his boyfriend was like this, and this sweaty.

I won’t move, Rei thinks mournfully, I can’t move. His head is spinning like, like Bram Stoker in his grave every time Rei opens his mouth, and he’s both hyperaware or everything and floating in the outer space, gently twinkling. Breathing is difficult and it’s very hard, it’s almost like getting up, or lifting a grand piano, but Rei puts all his will and might into it and moves his right hand towards his neck. Thumb and index finger rest on these two spots above the collarbones and Rei feels, even with his misty brain, his pulse thudding in his veins, the flow of blood so intense that his eyes snap open and he draws his hand back. It’s kind of disgusting.

It would be nice to vanish like that; vanishing seems like something cold to the touch.

I could write a song about this, he thinks, fishing out one coherent thought from the sticky soup of his mind. About this – feeling, like he was a string someone’s just hit, almost vibrating out of his body. Hearing what mites whisper to each other in secret, and not understanding what does it mean, when the screen of his phone shows circles, two dots and two sticks. His body feels soft, almost liquid, like the only thing stopping him from seeping through the panels on the floor was some cruel god, but at the same time, he’s hard and cold and his knees must be in pieces. And his chest, his chest is tightening but not in the way Koga can make it tighten, he’s actually suffocating and he sucks in a violent breath, and holds it until he can’t anymore, and releases, because one second longer and he’d explode.

Even without that, though, he’d like to fall apart. So he doesn’t have to be anymore. If he could, he’d rip himself to pieces, carefully and methodically, like you pull apart a block of yeast.

Why did things have to happen? Why, exactly, were things happening even right now? He never asked them to.

(This is what he could write a song about, if only things weren’t happening this much.)

No, it’s not true. He asked. Even now he’s asking, desperately begging whoever is listening to be– there, by his side, and not against his coffin or – flop! – against the floor, collecting dust. Someone spilled something sticky on the panels. He knows, his cheek landed in it.

Then he wakes up with a start, bangs his head against the side of the coffin and sits up, his everything hurting. He can’t see anything, and only accidentally slamming his hand against the keyboard of an unclosed laptop brings it back to life. Three. Zero Three Two Dots Two Five Fuck.

He opens his mouth with an objective: take a breath in mind, but he succeeds in letting out a whimper. One, then another, and then he’s folded in half, hot tears falling onto his clammy hands, body hot, heavy and pulsating. He doesn’t want to stop, because nothing guarantees solid sleep like crying for half an hour, but it’s embarrassing, even though he’s alone, so he presses a hand against his mouth, even though it’s doing nothing to muffle the pathetic noises he’s making. Not existing would be nice, lovely, cool to the touch, because he’s never going to write this song, never, ever, it’s impossible, it’s not even going to be a something-but-endlessly-worthless, it’s going to be a nothing, because he won’t, he simply won’t, even when the fans expect him to finish it off properly, even when the rest of school expects anything at all, even when Koga wants him to show these losers how strong UNDEAD is, we’ve been falling behind these goddamn knights all the time, it’s high fuckin’ time to win something once and for all, even when – Natsume-kun has said everyone is moving on, looking forward, to the future, but he’s wrong, he’s terribly wrong, and Rei is sweaty.

After a while – or maybe an hour later – he gathers enough energy to sit up. It takes him another thirty years to stand up, and then he cries some more, wetting the inside of his bag when he’s looking for his wallet. It feels big and heavy and pointless in his hand and he only doesn’t throw it against the floor because he’d have to pick it up. He slowly, very slowly realizes the right order of events: getting up, walking to the window, opening the window, testing the weather, figuring out if he should put on a jacket or just a scarf – and all energy he has mustered leaves his body almost completely. He is not going to do that. He is not. Going to do that at all, and if in three hundred years someone finds his skeleton, having perished in the three am cold at the tender age of nineteen and three months, well, maybe someone makes up a nice romantic story about it.

He leaves the room, a cluster of keys and a phone in one pocket and wallet in the other. The hall is completely dark and he leans against the wall with his eyes closed to get them used to it. The wall is cold and he briefly wonders if he could fall asleep while standing.

He doesn’t really – he realizes that when he’s already reached his goal – remember how exactly he managed it. Even though it was pitch black around him, he somehow didn’t fuck down the stairs to his death, succesfully put on his shoes and didn’t freeze to death outside, even though he can vaguely remember feeling really really cold. His consciousness only turns back on when he tries to get into the school store, and despite trying two keys out of probably a shitton, he can’t get the door to open. He winces and uses the phone to help himself at least see the keyhole better, and by the time he picks the right key, he’s shivering not from a full-body case of bad™ but from the most ordinary case of cold fingers, ass and every limb there is, including hair.

He closes the door behind and stops. In the last seconds before its certain death, his brain must have remembered that one stupid habit of spending money to feel better and pushed him to come here, but he doesn’t actually have any specific thing he’d like to buy in mind. The shelves storing dry food are perfectly indifferent, and the vending machines, with that particular kind of glowing and friendly humming, make him feel that rare emotion he haven’t felt since forever. At first, when he started staying at school overnight, it was a strong, confident _fuck yeah it’s my city now_ ; now it’s softer, duller, _it is quite nice no one will see/hear me having a depression_ , but it’s still, in a twisted, pointless way, reassuring.

Rei runs a hand through his hair (two hairs out) and steps into the store. The light is out, but the vending machines are bright enough for the guard to see there’s some loon wandering in here in the middle of the night like it’s his own living room. He hopes that whoever the he is, he won’t bother with him – Sagami had apparently talked to some people last year, maybe that included the guard – and just in case, he slowly, just like it was lunch break, approaches the machines.

Hands aren’t sweaty anymore. (At some point he must have wiped them on the blazer.) Just cold.

His go-to joybringer is milkis, but one look at his reflection in the glass – well, maybe a careful squint – and he realizes another carbonated drink wouldn’t be a good idea as his pupils are roughly the size of a head of a pin. Also, he’s still cold.

He ignores the packets of cookies, bags of chips and other charming things he would normally gorge on and after a short consultation with his wallet, picks the cheapest vegetable cup ramen there is. After he connects the computer to the socket, it demands cashier001 to log in, so after looking around for a helpful paper with a password and not finding one, he decides to risk it and politely puts in 1234.

Sakuma Rei, cured from depression by a cash register.

He scans the cup, forcing himself not to sit in the cashier’s chair, pays with a 500 yen coin, picks out the change and leaves the bill under the register, just in case.

The hot water dispenser is also disconnected, but Rei doesn’t want to check if it requires a password as well, so he dares to venture to the backroom. He washes his hands, boils some water in the kettle, and, considering it’s been a while and a guard, if he really wanted, would already be here, and if he isn’t, then etc., puts the cup on the counter next to the dispenser and sits in the closest chair.

He’s not exactly sure – maybe it’s just his imagination, or a feeling that it should be like this – but he feels there’s maybe something slightly, slightly resembling a smile on his lips. He knows that he won’t have the energy nor will to leave, and that it’ll make him curl on the floor again, except this time it will be recorded and _that_ will make him – like _that_ – again, but right now, he’s alone. A being, not even a Sakuma Rei but just a 0, one of the countless 0s in the binary code of the world, sitting in an empty school store at, ah, quarter to four in the morning on Wednesday, March the second, two thousand sixteen. Not that many people know that he exists, even less people have any sort of feelings regarding that fact, and no one, aside from himself and that one guard, if he exists too, or isn’t asleep, knows that he exists in this particular place. It’s as if he didn’t exist at all, and it’s nice. Cool to the touch.

He opens snapchat, leans back in the chair and takes a selca. It’s blurred (thank every deity in the world) but he still looks like a ghost, even paler in the cool glow of the vending machines, not looking into the camera, but more to the left. He can barely, barely see some steam rising from under the lid of the ramen cup. He plays with the filters, deciding on the monochrome in the end, and taps to enter text. He puts the phone down, looks around the store. His hands are sweaty. He forgot to disconnect the register, so he gets up (it’s somehow easier now) and does it. There’s a paper someone forgot to throw out next to the counter, but when he wants to do it as well, he finds out the trash can inside the store has no bag in it, so, feeling only a little like a complete dumbass, he puts it back where he found it. The employees working in the school store are more diligent than Nito-kun when he’s wiping the blackboard. The noodles must be soggy at this point.

He picks up the phone again and his fingerips leave sweaty marks on the screen, so he locks it and cleans it with a hem of his cardigan. A stupid thought crosses his mind, that he could use the ramen steam to wet the screen, and he almost tries it, but then he doesn’t. His hands are sweaty, what the hell, he’s washed them just a while ago.

 _i would die for you_ he writes

And physically recoils, like a rubber snapping, like countless times in the past when he was on the verge of sleep and for some reason his brain helpfully supplied him with a vision of his feet slipping down one step of stairs, like Shu when you pinch his sides, and he almost falls off his chair; stupid, wrong, not right, pointless and embarrassing and he forces the app close, clears all app activity, turns his phone off and pushes it so far down the counter that it almost falls as well.

He picks up a pair of disposable chopsticks and splits them apart so skillfully he gives himself a tiny splinter (he picks it out with his teeth, because his hands are shaking too much). He’s added too little water and the noodles burn his tongue in more than one way, but it doesn’t matter, why would it matter, why would it.

He’s an idiot.

He’s really an idiot.

It should be impossible, or illegal, to be this stupid, and Shu would probably have one of five insults to add, but Rei isn’t Shu, he’s a fucking dumbass who does absolutely pointless, humiliating shit at four in the morning alone at a school store, eating shitty soggy ramen with his stupid sweaty hands. Which he aggressively wipes on his blazer.

This is that one ｅｘａｃｔ thing he told himself not to do, and he does it. And through a stupid app, no less. Who does that? Dumb fucks, that’s who, and– and what even would he do with that information? Possibly the creepiest line in the world, in the middle of the night, he’d. He’d hate Rei more than he deserves. And maybe–

 _I’m going to go crazy_ , Rei thinks, turns the phone back on, makes two mistakes when unlocking it and opens the app again. Koga’s name is first on the list, with the last date being yesterday during lunch, when Rei, sitting right next to him, sent him a snap of his bento and Koga rolled his eyes and called him a dumbass.

Maybe he should delete the app, just in case. Or maybe just Koga’s name would be enough. Or maybe just.

He taps Wataru’s name aggressively enough to make the screen display a small rainbow, flicks a v at the screen, picks the creepy blue filter and adds a huge _flawless_ sticker right next to his eyebags, visible even though the pic is blurred again. Send.

When it comes to being a pathetic bitch, Wataru is… acceptable. Kanata is a cryptid Rei admired and he’d rather eat his entire uniform than appear vulnerable in front of him. He’s… he’s Kanata, and sometimes he looks at Rei like he knew, he knew not only things Rei doesn’t want him to know, but also things he doesn’t realize himself. Shu takes everything seriously and overanalyzes everything just like him, Natsume would probably try to outweird him and follow with an even stupider selca, assuming Rei just can’t sleep again, and Wataru… Wataru will either call him, and they’ll spend fifteen minutes talking about absolutely pointless shit like weather next week or the PE teacher’s new fancy ass kicks, until Rei feels separated from the reality enough to go back to the club room and fall asleep on the floor. Or he won’t do anything, because he’s asleep, and he’ll see the pic in the morning when it’s a/ too late, b/ Rei is already in a different, less _depression_ and more _memetic mutation of a depression_ mood, and it doesn’t matter.

Can’t hurt to try.

He finishes eating and takes the cup and chopsticks to throw them out, but since the bin is out of commission, he only washes his hands. When he comes back, his phone is buzzing.

“Are you at the school store”, Wataru stage whispers, voice brimming with laughter and Rei puts the phone on speaker.

Rei hums in affirmation. “You know. That kinda feel when you need to spend money so much you break into a school store. Yeah.”

Wataru whisper-giggles, then there’s some shuffling; Rei’s not sure if he’s in bed and he woke him up, or if he was doing something else, his watary things, like writing a poem about his doves or researching fruit bats (there was a phase like that once). Wataru says something sweet-sounding and makes a few kissy noises. Definitely doves.

“And what did you get?”, he asks, like it was middle afternoon and Rei just returned from a shopping spree. Oh. It’s been a while since he’s last talked to Narukami-kun.

“Vegetable ramen”, he sighs, “but I put in too little water and it was both too spicy and too hot.”

“Awwh, that’s like, yikes”, Wataru moans and Rei huffs out a laugh.

“Come on, be normal”, he says and Wataru says _ah_ like twelve times.

“But like, what, really, is normal?”, Wataru says and clicks his tongue a few times, “Is there a, how do you say it, uh, general normal normal? Or should we talk about a personal normal? What is normal, dude, that’s a deep thing here, y’know?”

Rei sighs. Maybe he should get… just water, just cool water from the dispenser.

“And, uh, y’know– aw damn – yesterday I talked to one of our rabbit’s little rabbit, rabbitlets, you could say, and his you know, yanno, y’know, rubbed off on me… I can control it normally, but now, talking to my brother of another mother, and father, when we’re at it, my heart and soul, give me your lips!, a noodle made out of the same flour, oh, you know that…”

“I know”, Rei interrupts before Wataru gets in a tangent about Frederic Chopin’s sexuality, and Wataru makes his signature disgusting noise number three and chastises him that no, no, you can’t say _I know_ , only _yanno_ makes sense, no, that’s illegal.

Rei sighs, rests his head on arms. The screen of his phone dims and he realizes he’s never tried using it while talking on the phone. He doesn’t have anything to do, though–

“You used the register?”, Wataru asks finally, voice full of childish excitement. Rei grins audibly, then stops.

“I even have a bill”, he brags, or just tries, because he’s not sure if his voice is alive enough, “And I hope I didn’t break anything. But just so you know, the password is one two three four.”

“Magical”, Wataru sighs, then “Hey, how about we play store? Do they have the breadly delights? I can never get one, it’s terrible!”

Rei gets up, stretches (his knees don’t like the concept) and ventures to the bread section. The box is empty and even the paper they used to put inside so the bread isn’t touching the box is gone.

“Mm, no, I think they bring them in the morning.”

Wataru lets out a rather loud sob, then an _aw shit_ , then sighs. Rei almost smiles. Seeing Wataru at school, it’s easy to forget that he’s a normal boy with parents. Hidaka-kun and that little suffering kouhai would probably love to see him getting chastised for leaving unwashed dishes in the sink and dirty socks inside his shoes.

“Well, either way, I can, like, ah, it’s so tiring, but we can, like, play store anyway, I’ll just grab my bike, real quick, wham-bam and I’m right here”, Wataru mutters, and then adds _umumu my little princess, yeah that’s you yeah!_ quietly. Rei thinks of Koga, calling Leon a fucking menace with that face, eyes squinting gently, nose scrunched and pouty lips, and he almost sobs himself.

“Don’t you need half an hour to get here by train?”, he rasps. Wataru creaks out something about details, details! in response, and they fall into a semi-comfortable silence. Wataru doesn’t feel the need to talk as much as normally when it’s the middle of the night, and Rei needs some time to get what he wants to say out, so for a while, no one makes any noise save for a muffled yawn from Wataru’s side.

“I almost”, Rei starts, and for a while he considers not saying anything at all, or turning it into a joke. I almost fell asleep, or: I almost got an idea for a song but it ran away from me. It would be fairly easy to make fun of his own unability to write anything, Wataru could probably relate, as an actor, because maybe actors have that thing where they can’t get into the character, or anything, at all. They’d chat a bit, say goodbye, and Rei would have enough time to take a shower and a quick nap.

He could do that.

But (his hands are sweaty) (maybe he should start carrying a handkerchief everywhere) the reality of what he almost hits him harder than before, and he’s quiet for long – carefully examining the feeling in his chest, the ugly painful thing he wants to rip his chest open with his bare hands right now – longer than Wataru can take it.

“You almost?”, he prompts, in a way most people say “And what did you get?” when their friends tell them about a great sale, but there’s something nervous in his voice and Rei’s thankful for it, because he’s disgusting, but then: he hates himself for that, too, for making Wataru concerned enough for that nervous something to show.

“Did the unspeakable”, he says gravely, and for a second panic closes a fist around all his blood vessels at once, because maybe, just maybe it sounds like he almost did what he’s been jokingly and not threatening to do for two years and hanged himself on old guitar strings, but – but Wataru would know. He’d know that Rei would never tell anyone, would he. Not on the phone. Not. Or maybe. Or

Wataru performs a nearly perfect act of yawning.

“You need to be more specific with that”, he says, and Rei, though he’s almsot vibrating out of the chair, can imagine him playing with the lock of spaniel hair he always has when he lets the little braid loose, “Released Shu’s nudes into the wild? Killed a man and dropped the body off at the stuco room instead of eating it like a normal person? Or… told your boyfriend of five weeks (with whom you have five different wedding ceremonies planned, I know the face when I see it don’t lie) that you kinda like him?”

Rei is silent again. Rei bites the ends of the chopsticks like a fucking animal. Rei considers jabbing one into his eye, experimentally, just to see what happens.

“Shu’s nudes…?”, he murmurs, not entirely sure if carefully or stupidly.

“The ones he explicitly told us to onanize to”, Wataru replies through a genuine yawn, “to which we all vanished from the group chat for the most terrifying five hours of sober Shu Itsuki’s life. It worms my heart you’ve picked up on this thing specifically. Warms.” Wataru says something more, quieter, so it’s probably aimed at the dove. “Rei? You write goth love songs for a living, you know.”

“I don’t”, Rei rasps in reply immediately, and it’s like a dam opened, “No one pays me, and I’m not writing present tense because I’m. Not even writing past tense and they won’t even hold me back again just flat out kick me out because I have ｎｏｔｈｉｎｇ and”

Rei stops, leans back in his chair to even out his breathing without Wataru hearing. There’s still some soup left in the cup, just a bit, not enough to scoop it out.

“And how did you know”, he sighs. Stupid. A stupid question.

“I talk to the people I deem not the worst in the world sometimes”, Wataru shrugs, “and they express the characteristics of a gossiping aunt. Sometimes.”

Rei stops breathing for a while. Wataru is, they both are speaking in unfinished thoughts and assumptions again, and he only understands the general feel of what Wataru’s said; that normally he’d be on his merry way to clown Shu Itsuki town, but not now, because he can’t bring up a recent full, proper conversation with Koga. They all seem empty, about local sales, or school, or how shitty Rei is at any given sport. Rei never asked him _just what do you want, what can I do to make you happy_ ; he was living there, having these feelings, and never once did he think to do something with them. To put them into something and make Koga smile, instead of forcing them down like it was something improper, even though Koga existed right next to him, clear and sincere and

“That’s”, Rei says, and he can’t even recognize his voice, like it was something he’s vaguely heard from next room and isn’t sure what it means. His throat feels tight and he needs a moment to realize he’s crying into the sad remnants of the soup in the cup.

Pathetic.

Humiliating and embarrassing to everyone involved. Wataru, he remembers, doesn’t know what to do when people are vulnerable, he prefers to be harsh and make people think on their own, not give loving advice and pat heads, and Rei… is being obnoxious, forcing his emotional mess onto him in the middle of the night, when he himself – similarly – did nothing to help him, ever.

That thought almost makes him physically topple over and he reaches towards the phone to end the call, turn his phone off, drown it in the toilet and himself somewhere else, preferably–

“Rei?”

The air is foam. Thick, dense foam and Rei’s sweaty hand stops in it, not moving save for the tips of his fingers trembling like they do.

Wataru said something, something, and Rei feels empty inside, if he focused, he would know what, but air is foam and Rei’s brain is mist and his hands

(it was ‘Rei’, his name)

 _What am I doing here_ , Rei thinks.

“ _Re-i_ ”, Wataru says, like he was hissing at him to pass him a note during class, “it’s four in the morning, same goes for me, Beyoncé will get active if I don’t go to sleep soon and don’t I have juniors to torment tomorrow?”

 _What does it mean_ , Rei thinks.

“I do”, Wataru continues, somewhat– proudly, as Rei struggles to understand the sentence, getting lost in all these words and meanings, “Rei? Rei.”

“M”, he says. It’s truly a miracle, because his throat still feels dry and tight like a forgotten well.

“See, you’re about to pass out”, Wataru says, slower. Oh, Rei thinks, I am. I am. “Go back, alright? To the club room. Get a can of pocari for tomorrow. But go back to the club room and sleep now, okay?”

Rei presses his lips in a tight line, so tight that it hurts. He draws a small circle on the table with a sticky finger, one, and then another. There’s a stain on the wall right in front of him, like someone spat on it, and when he opens his eyes to look at it, his eyelids feel thick and heavy.

Wataru says his name again. Rei draws another circle, then crosses it out. Wataru is right. He swallows, only making his throat feel more dry, and bites his tongue once or twice.

“M”, he nods. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

Wataru is tired. He’d like to sleep. He only called because he

Rei blinks several times. If it was a MV, it’d probably look bad. “Sorry.”

Before there’s an answer, he ends the call, turns off his phone, removes the battery and puts each in different pocket of his blazer. For a second he doesn’t hear anything, an exact silence in a place that clearly makes noise even when no one’s here, but then it comes to him, in stadia, slowly, first his breathing, then the soft thrum of his pulse, then the vending machines. He buys one can of pocari, wincing as it hits the bottom, and heads out.

Right before leaving, he turns around and examines the store. The chair is still moved back, but everything that should be turned off is turned off, so he leaves and closes the door, shuddering. The cold wraps his thin arms around him the second he steps outside, pressing against his body, just like he did a few nights before, to a physical being called Koga Oogami.

He feels a kind of pain that’s somewhat close to a physical one and slows down. He walks maybe five metres like this, forcing himself to straighten his back, but he breaks and speeds up again. Idiocy. Idiocy. Has he done anything that wasn’t idiocy today?

Wataru was tired. It was the middle of the night, so clearly. He was human. He didn’t deserve to hear, to be aware of – everything that happened in Rei’s dumb brain. Of Rei in general, because Rei was embarrassing, the entirety of Rei Sakuma was painfully embarrassing, not to himself, but to everyone that made the mistake of – socializing with him.

There are still tears on his cheeks. Rei wonders if they could freeze. Probably not.

Why did I do that, Rei thinks, about the events of past fifteen minutes as well as past nineteen years, as well as the general fact of his existence in places where people can see. Why did he force his parents to sign him up for dance classes? Why didn’t it stop, why wasn’t it enough, what was the reason, a logical reason, behind him, Rei Sakuma, looking at his whole self and deciding _hell yeah I am going to put this on tv_? Why did he ever, ever lay his hands on Koga?

The thrumming of blood in his ears is almost the same as when he held Koga from behind, legs tangled in the sheets, and felt his fluttering pulse under his tongue.

He steps into the school building and throws the noodle cup out along with the chopsticks.

Why did Wataru tell him to get pocari? It wasn’t coffee or tomato juice. Koga’s the one to drink pocari, and he deserves it more.

 _I would die for you_ , he thinks, looking at a street lamp through a dirty window in the hall until his eyes hurt. _I would. I’m not kidding_.

 _Do you think he would want that?_ , something tells him, and he wishes he had a coherent reply to this.

Something rustles under this feet when he enters the club room, but he doesn’t bother to turn the light on and with cold hands in front of him, step by step, he finds his coffin. The only source of light is the pale, washed out ghost of the moon and its smaller, more determined copy, a tiny dot of light in the side of Rei’s laptop, politely informing him that it’s charging. He sets the can next to it, his phone in two parts somewhere nearby and sits on the floor, hugging his knees close to chest, and presses his eyes shut to get used to the dark. When he opens them, the laptop is still on top of his coffin, along with papers and books, and he doesn’t know what time it is, so he goes horizontal, cheek against the cold floor. At least it’s cold; he closes his eyes.

 _Iseult had made it_ , he thinks, quite a pathetic attempt at dark humour, and then: _Wataru would laugh_ , and then, quieter: _no_. He rests his head on his arm, and hopes for a

 

But what wakes him up is a tense and pissed off warmth, and he knows he’s in trouble.

 

~~ but everything disappears ~~


End file.
